MindHacks.Org

Last week, the Dalai Lama joined a dozen top brain researchers in Washington, D.C., in a round of talks on the science and clinical application of meditation.
   
Tibet's spiritual leader has taken it upon
himself to bridge the gap between the
Eastern practice of meditation and
neuroscience. For a decade now,
he has challenged brain scientists to
study Buddhist practices of mindfulness
and meditation to understand how they
change the human brain.

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Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better – and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

People who meditate say the practice restores their energy, and some claim they need less sleep as a result. Many studies have reported that the brain works differently during meditation – brainwave patterns change and neuronal firing patterns synchronise. But whether meditation actually brings any of the restorative benefits of sleep has remained largely unexplored.

So Bruce O’Hara and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, US, decided to investigate.

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Spirituality is important to a majority of scientists in the United States’ elite research universities, says the researcher of a new study on religion.

These scientists are confounding the
prevailing opinion that academics
aren’t religious.

Researcher Elaine Howard Ecklund,
a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University
in Houston, surveyed more than 1,600
scientists from 21 elite research
universities. Ecklund designed the
survey to examine scientists’ religious and
spiritual beliefs as well as their practices.

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"Sleep on it" appears to be good advice for working through personal problems, according to a new study on dreams that occur for up to a week after a memorable event.

Canadian researchers from the University of Alberta and the University of Montreal provided support for the age-old advice with the help of 470 psychology students.

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For decades, Dalia Isicoff has suffered the agony of rheumatoid arthritis—joint pain, spinal fusion, multiple hip surgeries. Painkillers dull the aches, but it wasn't until she took a course at the University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Medicine that Isicoff discovered a powerful weapon inside her own body: her mind. Using a meditative practice called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, Isicoff learned to acknowledge her pain, rather than fight it. Her negative and debilitating thought patterns—"This is getting worse," "I'm going to end up in a wheelchair"—began to dissipate, and she was able to cut back on her medication.

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"Even if you're not a genius, you can use the same strategies as Aristotle and Einstein to harness the power of your creative mind and better manage your future."

The following eight strategies encourage you to think productively, rather than reproductively, in order to arrive at solutions to problems. "These strategies are common to the thinking styles of creative geniuses in science, art, and industry throughout history."

Read the entire article here.

Dr. William A. Tiller's studies and experiments have proven that human consciousness "changes space." And he explains how this works in a way that's easy for us to follow and understand.

But further — and of
importance to the subject
matter of our current
issue — he demonstrates
not only that Zero Point
Energy is, for all practical
purposes, absolutely
limitless, but that in it lies
our future potential.

It's not a hoax, and
it's not "science fiction."
It's science fact.
It's real, and
it's coming soon.

[MORE]

Women with small children have long been saddled with an unflattering stereotype -- incompetent, dull-witted, frazzled, and preoccupied with domestic affairs. The derogatory cliches vary, from ''maternal amnesia" in medical circles, to the colloquial ''placenta brain" in the United States and ''porridge brain" in Great Britain.

But a new body of research -- so far still mostly in animals -- is fueling the idea that motherhood may actually rewire the brain, making mothers (and involved fathers) more perceptive, competitive, efficient, and even socially aware. And sociological studies suggest that most of the symptoms of ''mommy brain" may be due as much to exhaustion and stress as biology.

Read the entire article here.

The uncanny ability of blind people to "sense" unseen objects has been demonstrated for the first time in sighted volunteers whose vision was blanked out by scientists.

The findings suggest "blindsight", which has been observed in blind people whose eyes function normally but who have suffered damage to the brain's visual centre, is a real and not imagined phenomenon.

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"We are sprits in physical form" -- a simple, dramatically powerful statement in one of Dr. Andrew Weil's best-sellers on nutrition. He offered no elaboration; but none is needed. Because he's absolutely right.

The spiritual is a new frontier of human experience. Polls show us increasingly to be "more spiritual than religious" with more of us having the mystical sense of something larger -- the sense that consciousness is not confined to our brains.

Read the full article here.